29 posted on Friday, October 14, 2011 1:37:15 PM by tenger: “Uh Folks, the Lord’s Resistance Army are not Christians. Look it up. Joseph Kony is its leader. The day someone takes him out is the day there will be cause for celebration in all of central Africa. Don’t disseminate wrong information.”
37 posted on Friday, October 14, 2011 1:44:14 PM by livius: “That’s not to support the LRA, incidentally; it is a vicious, violent cult run by a psychopathic “prophet” and while its “resistance” is mostly against Muslims, it also attacks Christians, although its “prophet” originally saw himself fighting against the Muslims. But I don’t think our military intervention is warranted.”
We in the conservative movement need to do some **SERIOUS** fact-checking on the Lord's Resistance Army and which side our President has chosen to support.
If NavyCanDo is correct in saying Rush Limbaugh didn't do his homework, we have a problem.
I'm not saying we should have gotten into this quagmire at all. I am far from convinced that this situation warrants American intervention. But now that we're in it, we need to take some hard looks at whether the LRA is, as the mainstream media are portraying it, a group of rapists and murders, or whether this is the President of the United States taking sides in a war that is perceived as being a religious war. The end result could be very damaging for the future of the United States since much of the world does think of military conflict in religious terms even if we aren't accustomed to thinking that way.
33 posted on Friday, October 14, 2011 1:40:13 PM by BuckeyeTexan: “I've never heard of a group of Christians raping, torturing, murdering, and enslaving children as means to establish peace on earth. The LRA doesn't sound like a group of Christians to me.”
43 posted on Friday, October 14, 2011 1:49:25 PM by LachlanMinnesota: “Kony gathers around himself superstitious animist, pagan and Christian illiterates who follow him, personally. He is not fighting Muslims any more than Christians or other religious beliefs. He has been creating havoc in the country for 20 years, and is a very bad soul. Don’t let people mislead you into thinking this guy is a Christian. He is not a crusader for anyone but himself.”
I am emphatically **NOT** defending the Lord's Resistance Army or its conduct. However, we're dealing with African rebels, not a disciplined European or even Asian military force.
Trying to hold the Contras in Latin America to American standards of military conduct — or the South Vietnamese or the South Koreans in prior conflicts — was not exactly a resounding success. The reason is that those American standards presume a disciplined cadre of military leaders who hold to Judeo-Christian values, and a much larger body of citizens who will take up arms to defend their country when needed and who share those values. Those citizens may need to be taught military order and discipline, but teaching people **HOW** to fire a rifle is far easier than teaching them **WHEN** and **WHY** to do so, or when **NOT** to do so.
We also need to remember our own Western history. With some important exceptions, the political leaders at the time of the Reformation and the Crusades were not exactly known for high standards of personal morality — many of them would quite correctly be attacked as hypocrites who used religion for personal profit or political goals. That's as true if not more true for many of the officers and soldiers in pre-modern armies of Europe.
We've been fortunate in the United States to generally have military leaders who held at least to culturally Judeo-Christian standards of ethics and enforced appropriate discipline on their troops, but many of the key military campaigns in European history were marked by grotesque levels of immorality, thievery, and wanton destruction of civilian lives and property. Even armies which were known as models of good order and discipline and which were motivated in large measure by religious zeal — Oliver Cromwell's military compared to the actions of the king's Cavaliers make an obvious example, but others could be cited — routinely committed actions which were harsh even by the standards of their day and would be considered war atrocities today.
We're used to the idea of American soldiers being the good guys who try to win over the population by handing out food, building public works projects, and holding disobedient soldiers to account. Those are all good things but they are products of our Judeo-Christian civilization that are not shared in a lot of other places in the world.
Rush is where I first heard of the story, and yes he did say the LRA was a Cristian freedom Fighter group which is where I made the mistake in repeating that here. I would think he would have a better research staff than that.